Accessible human centered product design for Procter & Gamble.
Human Centered Product Design, Design ResearchSeptember 2020 - December 2020
My Responsibilities: Creating user interview guide, conducting three rounds of user interviews, creating sketch renderings, creating executive summary, overseeing visual communication
Deliverables: Final design recommendations (sketch rendering, matrix of potential future design directions,) final presentation, executive summary of final design, product pitch video
Overview
In a group with two other students, we worked under the guidance of project “champions,” full time staff from Proctor & Gamble who had identified our area of need. Ultimately our project recommendations were taken by P&G and the project is now in its next steps for development.
Opportunity
Throughout the duration of the project, we relied on communication with our P&G champions, to ensure that the design work we were doing was in line with P&G’s intention for this project. Due to the nature of our project (serving a wide variety of users with a range of specific needs) and tight timeline of the class, we ended up iterating further on one specific idea, while still capturing the previous mockups and ideas so P&G had access to them for future development.
We signed a NDA at the start of our project to maintain a competitive edge for our solution should P&G choose to bring it to market. For that reason, details on the specific design work done cannot be shared. If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to me and I can work something out with P&G so that I am able to share more of the deliverables.
Process
As a group of three, we focused on conducting thorough user research to identify specific needs. Given the constraints imposed by COVID-19, all research was conducted remotely through DSCOUT.
A high-level timeline of our design process can be seen below:
We recruited users using the service DSCOUT. Due to sampling bias inherent to a voluntary, paid interviewing service, we struggled to find users that met our specific requirements. Ultimately we found five users with whom we were able to establish a steady interviewing relationship, and who we revisited for each round of interviews.
After conducting the first round, we synthesized the feedback and identified clear user needs. We then brainstormed potential solutions which fell under the project brief given to us by P&G.
From there we created our first round of prototypes, a mix of physical artifacts and storyboards. We presented physical artifacts through videos showing intended use. We created detailed interview guides tailored to ensure we were presenting the prototypes in an impartial and consistent way between meetings.
Once we got feedback, we reached a critical decision point in our design process. For each prototype we presented, three options remained: pass, persevere, or pivot.
Ultimately we passed on four of our ideas, meaning we did not continue them. There was one idea we persevered with, meaning we continued to refine it for our second round of prototypes. There were two key ideas we pivoted from, meaning we used the core insights from the feedback to inform new prototypes.
Our second round of prototypes were all physical artifacts, presented again in video form to our users. We captured all of the feedback from the users and allowed it to guide us again as we decided which ideas to pivot, pass, or persevere with.
To help us with this decision process, we combined a preexisting matrix which compared our range of users vs. range of needs with a new matrix which showed which needs each prototype satisfied. This resulted in one final matrix which mapped the range of prototypes/solutions we created against our range of users, to help us better understand how to select one idea to move forward with.
Impact
Ultimately we took one specific prototype from our second round which we decided to continue iterating on. We created a final digital sketch rendering of what a product based on this prototype might look like and how it might function. We elaborated on specific features to include, informed by insights from our previous rounds of testing.
We took this final product rendering and created an executive summary and product pitch video. Ultimately we presented the product, summary, and pitch video to a panel of P&G Designers and Engineers.
Additionally, we provided our project champion with the learnings from our Users vs. Prototypes matrix, to help them better understand how to continue the learnings from this project. While we were required to select one “hero” idea to iterate on further for our final deliverables, P&G is not constraining this project to simply one product. We see the potential for a suite of products based on combining a variety of our prototypes so as to better solve the needs of a wide range of users.